The Masked Singer

Is anyone watching this? It's utter trash, but I am completely hooked.

Edit: For those who haven't seen it, it's twelve "celebrities" in these crazy mask/costumes taking part in a "singing" competition. Someone gets voted off each episode and unmasked. There are clues through the episode to help people guess who each singer is.

 

I saw Pet Sematary on Friday. I think as a film, it was pretty decent. I thought the acting was well done, even by the cat, and I enjoyed the atmosphere. As a reader and fan of Stephen King's books, I'm not sure if it was a very good adaptation. I felt like the movie missed the point in a lot of ways; imo, the book is all about grief and how people handle it (or don't handle it) and I felt like that was rushed through in the film. The ending you describe points to that; the book ending is different and hammers home the horrible/crazy things grief can make a person do, while the movie ending seemed more typical horror movie-ish to me. I'm not sure how long the movie was, either, but it felt really short. I would have liked more time spent on the second half of the movie and more time in general spent on character development. There was some other shit that bugged me too- random book references that weren't explained, subplots (like that of Rachel's sister) that were given more detail in the book and thus made sense, but sort of seemed like padding in the film, and so on. The movie made a big change with regards to the first major character death that I'm sure some book fans are probably salty about, but it made sense to me and I thought it ended up working fine. I'd probably watch the movie again again, but I didn't love it like I loved the new IT.

As for The Masked Singer, I couldn't be happier with how this season turned out and I'm looking forward to the next season, even if they keep the same (mostly) shitty judges. Next season, I'm gonna stay off the internet and not try to guess too hard who each "celebrity" is, because I had pretty much everyone down by their second episodes and it took away some of the fun for me.

 

Lol. No one cares, anyway.

I haven't read the book in a really long time. I don't remember the focus being on the kids to the point where they had a lot of character development- the main character was Louis. The book had more of a relationship between Louis and Jud, the neighbor, and explained more of the lore of the area, a lot of which was left out of the film. Something that never was really said in the movie was that one of the reasons why they think that the animals came back wrong was because their owners waited too long to bury them, which kind of makes sense of why Louis tries with his child after Church comes back mean and ties back into the original book ending. I can't remember if the book ever really explained what happened to the people/animals buried in the cemetery, if their souls were gone and demons inhabited the bodies, or if the people were just twisted somehow, or what. It's a lot of psychological warfare- the "dead" purposely say things that they know will destroy their victims, and some of the things they mention are things that the "dead" wouldn't even know (for instance, as randomly dropped in the movie by dead!Ellie, "the great and terrible" is a reference to Rachel's sister who loved "The Wizard of Oz" as a child before she died, something Rachel never spoke to the children about). So in the movie universe, I wouldn't say that dead!Ellie's actions meant that the living Ellie had any animosity towards anyone in her family. As for why in the movie Louis saved Gage instead of Ellie, I think Gage was the only one he saw. I think the trees blocked enough of the road and he was so focused on the baby that he didn't realize that Ellie was in the way, too, until it was too late. I think the reason it was shot this way is because this is one of the first major deviations from the book. In the book, it's Gage that is killed by the truck and Ellie was never in danger of getting hit. I think they wanted to fake out book readers who thought they knew what was going to happen (except they forgot that the trailer gave it away). And in the original book ending, Louis is forced to (re)kill the baby after dead!Gage kills both Jud and Rachel (similarly to how that happened in the film), but drags his wife's body to the cemetery because he thinks she'll come back normal since he'd be burying her so much sooner after her death than Gage was buried. The book ends when she arrives back home. It has an uneasy open ending that I found scarier than the zombie shit in the movie.

The Masked Singer is a trashy reality show in Hulu. It's not scripted at all. Or, it pretends like it's not, anyway. Bunch of has-been, C-list celebrities singing in really awesome costumes while some of the lamest judges in history make cringy comments. I love it, though.